Why bestselling novelist Gerald Candless assumed a new identity years before his marriage and the birth of his two daughters isn't revealed until the penultimate chapter of the book, but the effect of his deception on his family drives Vine's deft character studies.

Clodagh Brown revels in climbing the rooftops of London, where she becomes an eyewitness to people's intimate lives and secrets, but she discovers that her compulsion could exact a terrible price.

"Anna is a young Danish woman living in London at the turn of the century. Homesick and lonely for her husband, she keeps her innermost thoughts in a diary. When she dies, these memoirs, spanning sixty years, will be published to international acclaim and huge commercial success. But as Anna's granddaughter discovers many years later, one entry has been cut out of the original journals, which may shed light on an unsolved multiple murder - the stabbing...

Ivor Tesham is a handsome, single, young member of Parliament whose political star is on the rise. When he meets a woman in a chance encounter -- a beautiful, leggy, married woman named Hebe -- the two become lovers obsessed with their trysts, spiced up by what the newspapers like to call "adventure sex." It's the dress-up and role-play that inspire Ivor to create a surprise birthday present for his beloved that involves a curbside kidnapping. ...

As her granddaughter reads Asta's diaries, they reveal unknown facets of a woman she thought she'd known. In 1905 Asta and Rasmus had come from Denmark and while he was away on business, Asta kept her loneliness at bay by writing her diary. On publication seventy years later, they reveal the truth of an unsolved crime.